How to rip anything: keep movies & music forever

If you’re too old to count yourself as part of the ‘Facebook generation’, then you’ll probably remember the days of analog media with some fondness. Copying your mates’ cassette tapes to a blank 60 or 90-minute tape with one of those massive dual-cassette boom boxes. Or dubbing carefully compiled mixed tapes for significant others, and recording TV shows and movies with a VCR. They were the days when you always puzzled over all the buttons you had to press to set the timer (a task that never seemed to get any easier no matter how many times you did it). And when you had a delightfully large entertainment collection in a cabinet in your loungeroom to browse through at your leisure.


These days, our personal entertainment options are far more varied, thanks to the digitisation of content and the introduction of super-fast and affordable internet connectivity. Physical mediums like CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs are still around for those with slower internet connections and limited bandwidth, but they’re increasingly making way for streaming media ‘instant gratification’ options like internet radio, music subscriptions, streaming video and catch-up TV services, online movie rentals and downloadable music, TV shows and movies. At the same time, the move to digital TV has allowed for more free-to-air TV channels in both standard and high definition, and cable TV services like Foxtel are scrambling to compete by offering more channels than ever before — more than 200 channels in the flagship premium package at last count, as well as alternative access options via mobile, Xbox 360 and online.

And yet despite this avalanche of content at our fingertips, ironically, we now have less control over the content we’re consuming. DVDs and Blu-ray discs are encrypted with copy protection mechanisms to prevent us from making a personal copy, which then limits us to playing them only on DVD or Blu-ray players, and also leaves us at the mercy of a fallible physical medium that’s easily scratched or otherwise corrupted. Most streaming multimedia services also use copy protection to prevent us from saving a copy of the stream to our computer, essentially leaving us shackled to our PCs in order to enjoy the content. Boxes that connect to the TV aren’t much better; while Foxtel and other PVRs let you record movies and TV shows to the built-in hard drive, it isn’t immediately obvious how to transfer those recordings to a PC so you can have a permanent copy. And while the VCRs and cassette players of old all had built-in recording features as standard, the majority of devices we now use to play back CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs don’t have any copying functions built in.

But just because content providers have made it harder to make personal copies of multimedia, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible — or even all that difficult. In most cases, you’ll need to spend some money on software or hardware to enable the copying, but the procedure for doing it is relatively straightforward across the different content types. We’ve broken this series up into a number of sections to match the types of content you may want to copy: music streams (which encompass internet radio and music subscription sites), video streams (including catch-up TV services, movie rentals, YouTube and overseas video content), free-to-air TV broadcasts, DVDs, Blu-ray discs and Foxtel.

Using the guides over the following two weeks, you’ll be able to save a permanent, unencrypted digital copy of each of the main content types to your computer hard disk, a USB flash drive, an external hard drive or a NAS box, and you’ll also have the freedom to watch them on whichever device you want (provided the format is supported) — regardless of whether you have an internet connection.